About
Sandra is the author of 13 books, including novels, memoir, short stories, creative nonfiction, and craft books for writers. She taught in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival from 1993--2023, and is on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University. Her most recent novel is Little Ships (05/2024). After 20+ years in Southern Oregon, she has lived in Missoula, MT since 2006. She is also a painter, primarily of landscape, and travels frequently in search of beautiful vistas.
Featured Work
LITTLE SHIPS, A NOVEL
After adolescent sisters Juni and Tilde Becker wake up one morning to find their mother dead, their grandmothers appear the very next day to scoop up the girls and their inconsolable father, Nick, and take them home to small-town Oregon. The women are full of loving resolve, but good intentions are small guns against the waves of adolescence and the young family's shocking history. Besides, the women--at ages sixty and seventy--are at their own crossroads. Across the months of spring, Nick reels from heartbreak and guilt; the sisters drift apart in the shoals of middle school; three marriages are tested; and the grandmothers seek new footing, in their own lives and with each other. There is no best way forward, but making-do offers the girls a path to the future; and the women discover they have surprising futures of their own yet to live.
Other Works
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The Last Draft, a Novelist's Guide to Revision
2017
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Swim, Stories of the Sixties
2017
Awards and Recognition
- Finalist for the National Book Award, for BEYOND DESERVING, 1991 Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Fiction Award, 1991